This invention relates to communications in general and, more particularly, to a way of facilitating communication with individuals reachable over a variety of communications options.
The Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) network, which has been in existence for over 100 years, is well designed and well engineered for the transmission and switching of 3 kHz voice calls. The POTS network is a real-time, low-latency, high reliability, moderate fidelity voice telephony network. It is not designed for, nor especially well suited to, other forms of communications, including wideband speech, audio, images, video, fax and data. The POTS network is inherently “telephone” or “handset” oriented and is driven by the needs of real-time voice telephony.
There are approximately 270 million users of the POTS network in the United States, making POTS access nearly ubiquitous throughout the U.S. On the other hand, the POTS network has high access costs and, for international calls, settlement costs.
Packet networks are general-purpose data networks which are not tied to fixed-bandwidth circuits. Instead, they are designed to transmit bits (in the form of a packet of fixed or variable length) only when there are bits to transmit. Packet networks evolved independently of telephone networks for the purpose of moving bursty, non-real-time data among computers and are distinguished by the property that packet communications are routed by address information contained in the data stream itself.
Packet networks are especially well suited for sending stored data of various types, including messages, fax, speech, audio, video and still images, but are not well suited for sending real-time communication signals such as real-time speech, audio, and video signals. Typically, one accesses a packet network through a client program executing on a personal computer (PC), and so packet networks are inherently “PC” oriented, and client/server driven. Packet networks provide access to distributed databases and have excellent search capabilities.
There are approximately 30 million users of packet networks in the U.S.; the number of users is growing rapidly and will continue to do so over the next decade. Today, the Internet (the largest and most renowned of the existing packet networks) connects over 4 million computers in some 140 countries. The Internet is implemented using a large variety of connections between those millions of computers. These interconnected computers can support applications, such as electronic mail and the World Wide Web, which facilitate communications between persons across the U.S. or around the globe.
The Internet's global and exponential growth is common knowledge today. The recent developments on the World Wide Web interfaces and information navigation software, such as a multitude of Web browsers, coupled with a continuously growing number of public access providers, are making the Internet a fundamental component of the information age, if not the information super highway itself.
Several alternate forms of communication have developed which utilize either the POTS network or packet networks (and sometimes both). For example, facsimile (fax) communication is now a commonplace option for transmitting copies of documents over the POTS network. Electronic messaging (e.g., e-mail) is a growing phenomenon for those who use a packet network, particularly the Internet, for communications. In addition, many companies today are using packet networks, locally or internally within the company, which are modeled in functionality based upon the Internet. These packet networks, denoted “intranets,” are typically private networks owned or controlled by the company or corporate user. Intranets are compatible with the Internet Protocol (IP), and often the same software used in connection with the Internet (e.g., Web browsers) is also used in connection with intranets. Intranet networks are often established to connect to the Internet through a firewall (i.e., a hardware/software combination designed to restrict unauthorized access to the intranet from the outside world).
A World Wide Web site on the Internet typically resides on a computer known as a server, which is accessed through the Internet by a person utilizing a computer, such as a PC. A Web site consists of one or more Web pages comprising scripts written in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) and typically resides on a server compatible with HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP, a protocol for interfacing with the Internet). Pages at a Web site are typically accessible and viewed by the person using the PC through software called a Web browser, which typically resides on the person's PC. A Web browser, such as the one by Netscape, interprets Web page HTML scripts to provide a graphical user interface that allows easy access to various services over the Internet. Equivalently, Web sites internal to and locatable over a corporate intranet may be set up and accessed in a like manner using the same or virtually the same software (e.g., a Web browser). Such Web sites internal to a corporate intranet are typically HTTP compatible and addressable using URL techniques, and contain Web pages comprising HTML scripts.
Persons may browse the World Wide Web for virtually any kind of information, including information having content derived from one or more media, such as words, sounds or images. Increasingly, businesses are establishing Web sites as a means of providing information to and attracting potential customers, and Web sites are emerging as a means of transacting business. One may locate a company's Web site by, e.g., using one of a number of existing search engines available over the Internet, or browsing other Web sites containing links to the company's Web site, or entering directly the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), which represents an address for the Web site. Typically, Web browsing takes place in the context of an interactive communication session, where one may, for example, direct the Web browsing session by choosing to follow hypertext links found in Web sites and/or may respond to information located at various Web sites.
An Internet-related development is packet telephony. Packet telephony involves the use of a packet network, such as the Internet, for telecommunicating voice, pictures, moving images and multimedia (e.g., voice and pictures) content. Instead of a pair of telephones connected by switched telephone lines, however, packet telephony typically involves the use of a “packet phone” or “Internet phone” at one or both ends of the telephony link, with the information transferred over a packet network using packet switching techniques. Intranets can also be used to provide electronic messaging as well as other packet-type functionality.
These communications options mentioned above provide, along with regular POTS telephony, alternate paths for communicating between individuals and groups. A computer, such as a PC, is commonly used to provide output for display of a Web page or other multimedia content to a person using it, for example through a video display and accompanying hardware for playing audio. Such output may take the form of at least one of textual, graphic, animation, video, audio, or virtual object media. The computer or PC is also commonly capable of accepting input from the person using it; such input may be provided by means such as a keyboard, a mouse, a telephone touch pad, a television remote control, a microphone, a MIDI port and so on.
As the concept of communications between individuals and groups changes over time, and further with the inclusion of messaging capability, image and video telephony, handwriting transmission, and the integration of voice, other audio, image, video, handwriting, and data, it becomes essential to provide some easy-to-use and convenient mechanism to link people together who want to communicate with each other. To illustrate the complexity of the task, consider trying to communicate with someone having the following ways of being reached:                home telephones (often there are two or more lines in a private residence)        work telephones (generally people can be reached via at least one work POTS number and a secretarial pickup)        cellular telephone (about 15% of the population can be reached via a cellular telephone)        video telephone (e.g. Vistium system or Picturetel system)        pager/beeper (through either appropriate software or via 800 number services, individuals can receive ASCII messages or numeric phone numbers to dial)        voice mail systems (most businesses provide voice mail (voice messaging) for use when there is no secretarial pickup or for calls that come in out of normal business hours)        video mail system (this is a feature that will start to be provided as videophones and Vistium-like systems start to proliferate)        e-mail systems (individuals often have two or more e-mail addresses—e.g. Unix e-mail, ATT Mail, Lotus Notes e-mail, Internet e-mail, or intra-corporate e-mail)        home answering machines (most private homes use telephone answering machines to record messages when away from home, or when the phones are turned off; also there is some use of network voice mail services)        IP (Internet Protocol) addresses (which may be static when a person is attached via a Local Area Network (LAN) connected to a corporate network, or which may be dynamic when a person is attached via a modem connection to an Internet service provider, such as AT & T WorldNet™ Services); this type of connection is also used for collaborative work systems with shared workspaces, e.g. Vistium Share        business FAX number (associated with either the individual or the workgroup within the office environment)        home FAX number (associated with a hardware FAX machine at home, or with a FAX/Modem on a home PC)        paper mail (distributed electronically to e-mail addresses via services such as POST)        home page (individuals and businesses may have a home page associated with a Web site, e.g., locatable over the World Wide Web using a URL address)        
As one can see from the above list, any individual trying to reach another individual has to deal with the daunting problem of knowing which ones of all of these options of reaching a person are in fact practical options for reaching that person, of determining the applicable communications number or other communications address for such available communications options and, in addition, making a decision as to which is the appropriate option to use taking into account the time and the purpose of the communication. Often this is a difficult—or an unsolvable—problem. For example, consider how one would determine the active (e.g., via modem) or passive (e.g., via a LAN) IP address of an individual connected to a data network, as would be needed for direct real-time IP-addressable messaging; on the other hand, messages may be sent to one's packet network address in non-real time via currently-available e-mail techniques and, thus may be a preferable option for packet messaging when an active IP address is unavailable. Other problems include the physical difficulty of making the desired type of communications connection which would render that mode of communication impractical for the desired purpose (e.g., if it was desired to send a voice message without disturbing the addressee, how could you connect to a home answering machine without the phone ringing and being picked up by the owner?; if such a capability is not available, another communications option may be preferable).
What is desired is a way of easily determining what communications options are available for contacting an individual at the time and for the purpose of the communication and, additionally, the appropriate communications number (or address) for such communication contact.